Field of the Disclosure
The present invention relates to a composition, method and apparatus for removing soil contaminants, and more particularly for the removal of soil contaminants by saturating the contaminated soil with a recyclable, non-toxic encapsulation agent that separates oil and other contaminants from the soil.
Discussion of the Background
Soil contamination has become a major problem because of the large amounts of man-made pollutants and chemicals that have been put into the environment. These contaminants affect the environment and endanger people's health. People's health can be damaged by various ways; for example, by touching the soil, or by breathing the air in the area where the soil is. In addition to the foregoing, the people's health may be endangered due to ground water contamination as a direct result of the soil contaminants. Federal and state laws have been enacted to mandate the clean-up of both intentional and unintentional contaminated sites.
The most common causes of soil contamination are oil, diesel, gasoline, petroleum-based products or other hydrocarbons exposed over a surface, including soil and sand, or a body of water due to oil spills and others. Major sources of these contaminants are refineries, gas stations, chemical plants and oil industries.
Currently, several apparatus and methods are used to clean-up contaminated soil. Alcohol, petroleum-based solvents or water are among the methods used to dissolve the contaminants from the soil and then return the cleansed soil to the original site. However, these processes have a number of disadvantages. For instance, the solvent used in those processes dissolves the contaminants from the soil resulting in a homogeneous mixture of solvent/contaminant. In these cases, it requires different or several post-treatment processes, such as distillation, to separate the solvent/contaminant mixture in order to re-use the solvent in the soil remediation process as well as to properly dispose the contaminant pursuant to federal and state law. These post-treatment processes are expensive and time consuming.
Furthermore, in most processes large amounts of solvent is needed to completely clean the soil thus making the process expensive and ineffective. Also some of the solvents used in the art are toxic thus requiring post-treatment of the soil before returning it to the original site.
Therefore, there is a need for a composition, method and apparatus for treatment contaminated soil on site which uses a non-toxic encapsulating agent that can effectively separate or remove contaminants from soil but also that can be amenable to an easy separation from the contaminant. In light of this, the contaminants may be disposed pursuant to federal and state law, and the non-toxic encapsulating agent may be recycled back in the remediation process.
Thus, in view of the above-mentioned deficiencies in the art, an object of the present invention is to provide an encapsulating agent to be used in soil remediation which is non-toxic, non-flammable and non-harmful to flora or fauna and containing no carcinogens.
It is another object of the present disclosure to provide a water-soluble and biodegradable encapsulating agent.
It is another object of this disclosure to provide a continuous, closed-loop system, which recycles the encapsulating agent in the soil remediation process.
It is another object of the present disclosure to provide a method and composition simple and cost-efficient for removing soil contaminants.
Further another object of the present disclosure is to provide an apparatus for using a recyclable encapsulating agent that separates efficiently contaminants from soil at the original contaminated site.
Furthermore, the encapsulation agent of the present disclosure is effective for acting as a cleaning solvent for petroleum products, such as oil spill cleanups or removal of tar and grease waste.